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Colorado has the second most-educated adult populace, but largely because it imports college-educated labor from other states. Almost 56 percent of Coloradans have a high-quality certificate, associate's degree, bachelor's degree, or higher. Yet at the same time Colorado has the fifth lowest high school graduation rate in the nation. The state's 77 percent high school graduation rate puts it close to the bottom--the national average is 83 percent. Because the state is committed both to improving the quality of its workforce and to improving opportunity for Coloradans born in the state, it has set an educational attainment goal that by 2025, 66 percent of state residents will have a postsecondary credential. The majority of states have set overall postsecondary attainment goals, but Colorado has gone a step further by setting 66 percent goals for each significant racial and ethnic grouping. State leaders expect each racial and ethnic group in the state individually to reach this goal, but right now only Whites are on track to do so: Latinos and Native Americans are the farthest behind in reaching the goal (29% of each have a postsecondary credential), Whites are the closest (64%), and Blacks are in between (39%). Among the racial and ethnic subgroups, Latino high school students are the most underserved. Colorado's postsecondary attainment gap between Whites and Latinos ages 25 to 34 is the highest among the nine states that have at least one million Latinos. This report is a pipeline analysis of Colorado high school students attending public colleges in the state, since that is within the purview of what Colorado leaders can address in order to meet the state's educational attainment goal. Using state administrative data, it examines the postsecondary enrollment, completion, and earnings of White and Latino Colorado public high school graduates who earned a high school diploma between 2009 and 2011.

This report shows how state leaders are using technological advances to improve the use of data in five critical areas: (1) Helping economic and workforce developers, businesses, and colleges to reduce the high costs resulting from uninformed education and workforce decisions; (2) Assisting college leaders in making program-related decisions that take into account labor market needs; (3) Ensuring that postsecondary education and training programs strike a balance between learners' foundational knowledge and what they will need to know and be able to do in the workplace; (4) Enhancing high school counseling and college advising to make the process of exploring, entering, and finishing college easier for learners; and (5) Helping workers understand how to take advantage of postsecondary education and training options as they change jobs and navigate their careers. These five practices call for the integration of postsecondary education and workforce data to support individual, organizational, and policy decisions. Together, they represent closer alignment between the postsecondary education and workforce sectors. Alignment does not mean that the postsecondary sector becomes the pawn of the workforce sector, or vice versa; rather, the two sectors work in concert to contribute to a state's overall success. The tools featured in this report represent how leaders within and across eight geographically diverse states are using labor market information to build a more complete picture of what happens to learners and workers before, during, and after they complete their postsecondary studies. Each section of the report includes an overview and describes the data being integrated, as well as the intended audience for each of the Five Ways. Each section concludes with one or more state examples.

Because states typically fund districts based on student counts, districts reporting shrinking enrollment worry about shrinking dollars as well. The seemingly obvious quick fix is for states to hold districts financially harmless for some or all of their enrollment loss. But states have many factors to weigh when deciding whether or how to go down the "hold harmless" path, and state-by-state context matters. This brief explores some of those considerations. It also includes a list of states that have added or are considering new hold harmless provisions in response to pandemic-driven enrollment losses, as well as states that already had existing policies.

Weighted student funding (WSF) decentralizes control over resources and empowers principals as financial leaders of their schools. In this study, we set out to understand how principals are making use of those leadership opportunities. Based upon a 2017-18 survey of 639 principals in 14 school districts implementing WSF, we find that principals are actively engaged in the budget process and utilize their flexibilities, but often do not come into their role with the financial leadership training to carry out those tasks. Among the findings: (1) Principals understand how WSF works and why their district is using it; (2) Principals in WSF districts take the lead on budget decisions for their schools; (3) Principals in WSF districts involve school-level stakeholders often left out of the budget development process; (4) Principals in WSF districts customize spending for their school community; and (5) Many principals lack formal training to fully leverage the benefits of WSF. While our results capture some of the variability in principals' experiences across WSF districts, more research is needed to understand how these results are shaped by the diversity of rationales motivating districts to adopt WSF, as well as continued evolution of WSF within and across districts.